In Morris we saw a big billboard that read, “Give money to the chamber of commerce. Help pay for the flood victims’ hotel bills,” Lish had read that they were all covered by the government, so she snorted when she read the billboard. We wondered if Mercy’s blackmail plan would work with Bunnie Hutchison. We saw a billboard that read, “Jesus is the way, the truth and the light.” We saw another one reading, “An unborn baby’s heart starts beating at four weeks.”
Hope read every billboard out loud to herself and said, “Hey Mom, Lucy, didja know that a baby’s heart starts beating when it’s four weeks old?”
Lish hollered to the back, “An unborn baby’s heart, Hope.”
“What?” Hope yelled to the front. “Stubborn? A stubborn baby’s heart starts beating?—”
“Unborn, un-born,” Lish yelled back.
“How can you have a baby that’s unborn?” asked Hope. “You have to be born to be a baby.”
“Hope,” said Lish. “A baby that’s still in the womb is unborn. It’s alive in there, it’s just not out yet.”
“Well,” said Hope, “you have to be out to be alive, don’t you?”
“No,” said Lish. “The babies inside eat and pee and all that stuff living people do.”
“Oooh, yuck,” said Hope. “How big would the heart be? About the size of a lentil? MOM? I’M ASKING YOU A QUESTION!”
Lish put in a k.d. lang tape and turned the volume up. We chugged along through Morris and St. Jean and some other places. We were headed for Emerson and the border.
Rodger had assured us that he had removed all traces of marijuana and anything else from the van. Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do about the “I Brake For Hallucinations” bumper sticker. Lish had taken off her sunglasses and hung them on the neckline of her shirt. Dill had dozed off again and the girls were drawing. It was our time of the day. Dusk. My favourite time. This time and very early morning. These were the times people like us made sense. Before and after the hulla-balloo of the work day, before and after the real time, when interest rates and house taxes and rental equipment and bad debts and loan payments and funeral homes and car washes and TV repair shops and malls and soup kitchens and utility companies and garages and car dealers and daycares and daytimers and mandates and agendas and health clinics were all busy and we were hustled off to the wings. In the early morning and at dusk we emerged, purposeful, engaged, necessary. People stopped and smiled at us. We smiled at ourselves. During the day, the busy busy work day, we were temporarily forgotten. We mothers and children. Like the smell of Simonize floor wax and the distinct orange of Mercurochrome, we were reminders of another time.
“Okay, Lucy,” said Lish. “When we get to the border, let me do the talking, not that we have anything to hide, I just don’t want them to get suspicious.”
“Suspicious? Why would they get suspicious of me? Of totally normal me? Look at you. They’ll take one look at you and think you’re some kind of escaped mental patient or something. Me. You gotta be kidding.”
“No, no, Luce, you see I’m so obvious, they won’t even bother to bother me. They’ll worry about you. You know, being so normal and together-looking.”
“Yeah, well, they’ll worry more about me if I don’t say anything. Why don’t I fire up a chain saw and wave it out the window when we go past? Why don’t I just pretend to be dead in the back of the van? Geez, I can’t help it if I’m normal-looking.”
“No, no, they have a strict policy on bodies going across the border. You can’t even go over with the chicken pox. Rodger and I tried when Hope and Maya were two and three and they took one look at their spots and made us turn around and go home.”
“Well, you should have been at home anyway, if they were sick.”
“So, Lucy, when they ask us where we’re going, we have to know, and when they ask us how long we’re staying, we have to know that, too, and how much money we have on us, and we have to prove that the kids are ours. Or maybe that’s coming back. Is it going or coming? Now I can’t remem—”
“Lish! Look at that sign. Over there. Look. Where I’m pointing.”
“So? You want to buy honey? I don’t think we can bring honey across the border. You don’t feed honey to Dill, do you? Kids under a year aren’t supposed to eat honey for some reason. Mercy told me that, naturally. Although Teresa used to smear it all over her kid’s soother to quiet him down and he lived, so who knows?”
“No. No. Oh my god. You know what, Lish? That’s the place, right under that sign in the ditch. Where my mom died. I know it. Right under that honey sign. I can’t believe it’s still there. You’d think they’d have taken it down.”
“Geez, I guess. But, well, why? They’re still selling honey. Probably.”
“Yeah, I know, but who would feel like buying honey from a guy who has his billboard right over the place where somebody died? Like, was killed.”
“I don’t know. But Lucy, I don’t mean to sound callous or anything, but nobody but you and your dad really would know that somebody, I mean your mom, died there. You think he should move it over a bit or just take it down completely — Lucy?”
“What.” I had started to cry. I wasn’t going to cry anymore about it but now I had started to cry. Now I was crying just like everybody else seemed to be. This was turning out to be one wet summer.
“Do you want to stop for a minute by the sign or …?” Lish was peering into the rearview mirror.
“No, no. Well. Okay. Yeah, okay. Do we have time?”
“Lucy. Of course we have time. Time is what we have.”
“Fine.”
“Okay. KIDS WE’RE STOPPING. SIT ON YOUR BUMS AND IF YOU HAVE TO PEE, GET READY TO DO IT NOW. Or maybe not Lucy? Would it be okay if like they peed here if they have to? Or we could wait, we’re almost at the border.”
Lish stopped the van and she and I got out. I stared at the honey sign.
“Lucy?” said Lish.
“No, no. Of course they can pee here. Geez. She’s not buried here. Look at that sign. It’s peeling. My dad said when my mom died they had just put up this new honey sign, ’cause the guy, the honey guy, came out to check his new sign when the cops were here and my dad and everything right after, and a lady cop who was with my dad asked me later if he was okay because he kept asking the guy Do you sell a lot of honey? Do you sell a lot of honey? and you know my mom lay there. And now the sign is peeling and all worn out looking. It’s so weird, like because for me my mom died, you know, like yesterday. She dies almost every day in my mind, you know, it’s fresh. But look at that sign. God, you must think I’m a total basket case. I’m sorry about this.”
“You don’t have to apologize Lu—”
“Lish!”
“What?”
“The kids are trying to get out of the van. You better go and let them out before they bugger up the sliding door.”
Lish muttered something and moved along the shoulder of the highway back towards the van. I stared at the ditch and the sign. I couldn’t go into the ditch because it was full of water. The honey sign, which was stuck into a farmer’s field on the other side of the ditch, had water about two or three feet up its post. Why on earth would someone want to steal that stupid car? I could picture my mom lying there wearing my dad’s big windbreaker and her wool skirt and sneakers, lying there on her back as she always did when she slept, holding that big briefcase of files across her chest. Or had it been flung beside her or way off into the field? All I know is that the guy who killed her flung it out of the car after her, or at her. The records of those women’s lives. My mom was desperate to keep them, to preserve them and protect them.